Don’t expect Uber’s inevitable initial public offering any time soon. “I feel like we maybe just entered high school,” Uber C.E.O. Travis Kalanick said Wednesday, in conversation with Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter at the New Establishment Summit in San Francisco. “It’s the ninth grade. It’s not time to go to prom yet.”

Uber, whose $68 billion valuation makes it the world’s most valuable private company, has raised $8.71 billion in funding since its 2009 founding. “We’ve raised money so we can invest it and grow the business, geographically and across products and technology,” Kalanick said. “So we’re doing it to invest it. We didn’t raise money so we could hoard it, we raised it so we could invest. That’s what our investors expect. I don’t know if the general public totally gets it.“

Uber has 40 million monthly active paying riders, and drivers make between $1.5 billion and $2 billion in total each month, Kalanick noted. Twenty percent of all Uber rides globally are booked through UberPool, the company’s carpooling service.

Uber, which has adhered to an aggressive growth model, has seen its losses increase this year as it readies its bid for international domination. A Bloomberg report revealed that the company lost more than $750 million last quarter, and $520 million the quarter before, for a total loss of at least $1.27 billion in the first six months of 2016. It’s difficult to put losses that large in context: Amazon, a company that famously went public while it was still unprofitable, laid off 15 percent of its employees after reporting a $1.4 billion loss in 2000—its biggest of all time. According to a person familiar with the matter, the majority of Uber’s losses in the second quarter were due to the company’s recently abandoned bid to expand its business in China.

The ride-hailing company faced stiff competition from Didi Chuxing, leading both companies to burn through billions of dollars to defeat the other. This summer, however, Uber admitted defeat in the People’s Republic, selling Uber China to Didi and creating a new, joint entity worth $35 billion. Having stanched its bleeding in China, Uber is expected to refocus its efforts on the U.S. domestic market and the development of the self-driving car technology that the company sees as key to its long-term profitability.

“We thought it would be super interesting and maybe impossible to do a transportation thing in China,” Kalanick said. “China is just so different from the rest of the world. I got my best 6 or 7 people and we camped out in an apartment for a couple weeks in Beijing and figured it out. Six or 7 months later we launched.” Uber invested about $2 billion in China and eventually merged its operations with Didi. But doing business in China wasn’t easy. “In China, the government is involved in business in many different ways,” Kalanick said. “They’re involved in media and business. When you go to China, you have to rethink how you’re doing everything. You have to become Chinese. And if you’re not willing to become Chinese, and you think you know how to do something best, you’re going to get your ass handed to you. You have to be humble and assume everything is different until proven otherwise.“

Uber’s self-driving car initiative comes after incremental progress with self-driving cars in Pittsburgh. In early 2015, the company announced a partnership with Carnegie Mellon University’s robotics division, eventually poaching dozens of Carnegie Mellon researchers to work on Uber’s self-driving cars. Earlier this year, the company unveiled its self-driving version of the Ford Fusion, and had reportedly approached a number of automakers about partnerships. “When you start to automate, you start to do the self-driving thing, you make it much more efficient,“ Kalanick said. “When these cars go into self-driving, you start to become a robotics company. We’re at the very beginning stages of becoming a robotics company.“

Ultimately, Uber took a strategic investment from Toyota. Now, Uber has teamed up with Volvo in a $300 million partnership to bring 100 self-driving Volvo XC90s to the streets of Pittsburgh. And the company isn’t stopping there: with its acquisition of self-driving truck start-up Otto, Uber has become the first ride-hailing company to make the much-anticipated transition to self-driving vehicles.

Despite his company’s unprecedented valuation and global reach, Kalanick told Carter that he hasn’t really changed much from the time when he was a kid. “The people who know me know I’m pretty much the same,” he said. “I was the straight-A student, but sort of a little bit of debating my parents all the time, trying to find when they weren’t logically correct.”

And even though he has a net worth of $6 billion, Kalanick revealed onstage Wednesday that he hasn’t sold a single Uber share, and the biggest purchase he’s ever made is his $1 million home in San Francisco. He might be the founder of a start-up valued at $68 billion, but he still has a mortgage.